Brent Butterworth

I first talked with Brent several years back when I wanted to get permission to re-print an awesome article he wrote back in 1997 when he was still with Home Theater magazine. It stuck with me all these years, because this article was dedicated to 8 track tapes, and this was a home theater magazine, written during a time when DVDs and digital sound reigned supreme!

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Turntables: Old vs New

Two vintage record players. One modern turntable. Three copies of the same record. And one answer to the question: How do vintage turntables compare to today’s models?

Everybody knows vinyl is white-hot these days. And everyone’s getting in on it. You’ve got 16 year-old kids looking for the next hip thing. You got 70 year-olds looking to recapture the sound of their youth. The question is, what turntable do they buy? The days when you could walk into your local electronics store and choose among 15 or 20 models are gone. It seems like there’s not a whole lot of choices these days except for $100 plastic junk or $1,000+ audiophile turntables. Except for one alternative most people never consider: vintage turntables.

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Receiver Shoot-Out: Vintage vs. High-Tech

A blind test finds out if 1970s receivers can hold their own against the latest stuff

What piece of audio gear has changed as much as the receiver? Since the early 1980s, receivers have grown from friendly devices into monstrosities almost no one can figure out. It used to be that the toughest part of designing a receiver was finding cool new features to add. Now it’s figuring out what features you can afford to cut because there’s no room for any more jacks!

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The Shock of the Old

Why do more and more people prefer the audio gear of yesterday to the state-of-the-art products of today?

As an electronics journalist, I’m around audio enthusiasts a lot. But I’ve never seen so many of them get so jazzed about a single piece of gear as I did when a 1978 Pioneer SX-1980 receiver recently came through the doors at Innovative Audio, a Vancouver, BC vintage audio dealer. Some offered to buy the Pioneer on the spot. Some joked about stealing it. Every one of them had to touch it, lift it (or at least try) and somehow connect with this 270-watt-per-channel monster.

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An Interview With Gordon Sauck

A pioneer in the vintage audio business tells why the older gear is better.

What’s innovative about Vancouver, BC’s Innovative Audio isn’t the products it sells, but the products it refuses to sell. Instead of offering brand-new, state-of-the-art products, Innovative Audio focuses exclusively on vintage audio gear.

It wasn’t always this way. Innovative Audio started out selling new home theater gear, but founder Gordon Sauck soon realized his customers were more interested in the classic used gear on the back shelf than they were in the complicated new products in the front of the store. Sauck took the bold move of eliminating all the new gear from his store, moving to a new and larger location, and specializing entirely in vintage audio. In a few short years the store grew from a modest-sized retail outlet to the largest vintage audio facility in Canada.

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Innovative Audio Cassette Deck Shootout: Take 2

Vintage Cassette Deck Death Match: Can decades-old decks survive modern computer-based measurements?

Any time you do a comparison test with audio products, someone’s bound to get mad. When you do it with vintage audio products, it’s worse. With new stuff, few people own the products yet. With vintage stuff, lots of people do.

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How Much Power Do You Really Need?

A lot of audiophiles think you’re better off with just 8 or 10 watts rather than 100. Are they right? Let’s listen and find out!

In the 21st century, we’ve gotten used to having everything we want. We demand to hear any tune ever recorded right now. We insist on studio-quality sound everywhere, even when we’re on a wilderness hike. But it wasn’t always this way. Audio used to be challenging. Back in the days of tubes, and even the early days of transistors, power was precious.

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